36 Ù 'TY BOD ( -. ' Q .' ) LAvOft \'HAN Dy"WAY TO ORDER BALLANTINE'S ALE g. BEER Copr' t 1939, p. Ballantin & Sons. Nt'wark. N. J. Ad 'e1.tisement IlL go to 107 Faubourg St. Denis, which is a polite way of saying to St. Lazare Prison, and had given him a fairly good tip, too. On the twenty-seventh day of her hunger strike, Paris was less delighted, for Hanau was close to death. Weak as she was, though, she wasn't too far gone to make a deal. She wrote the judge that she would start eating "as a favor and so as not to impede justice." The next day, after sixteen months' incarcer- ation before she had even been tried, Mme. Présidente was let out on bai1 of 800,000 francs. Half of this sum was raised as a gift by thousands of her still de- voted and credulous custom- ers. By now, Hanau's public rôle had changed from champion to martyr. Because her red-corpuscle count was dangerously low, by doctor's orders her trial was delayed until October, 1930. For its opening in the 11 th Cor- rectional Court, two hundred cubic me- tres 0 f documents relative to her case had been assembled. The act of accusa- tIon took nearly three hours to read, and was followed, as the court stenographer recorded, by the judge's opening state- ment: "Now we'll all take a twenty- minute rest. (Hilarity.)" Hanau had twenty notebooks of refutation in her satchel, Vittel water for refreshment, and cough drops, which she sucked whenever she had shouted herself hoarse. Not only by her noise but also by her brain, mem- ory, and brilliant strategy, the prisoner dominated the court. During her five months' trial, she never ceased putting up a magnificent, futile fight. "You're a terrible client for your lawyer, Ma- dame," the judge admiringly said. "You leave him nothing to add in your de- fence." Her speeches truly covered ev- erything. From behind the screen of her malpractice emerged her own purer vis- ion of what she called democratized banking: banking in which the deposi- tor was a business associate; in which corporations were to be coöperatives; systems in which bank employees shared, as hers had, in the bank's investments and in which banks were open in the evening -hers was the only one in France which ever was-in order to discourage French workmen from hoarding their wages in their socks. French banking methods and manners date from the time of Louis- Philippe; to the conservative court, Ha- nau's ideas seemed futuristic rather than modern, though there are liberal finan- ciers today who still admire her ideas SEPTEMDER .2, t 9 9 as much as they deplore her amoralitv. On March 28, 1931, her battle came to its end; she was pronounced guilty, sen tenced to prison for two years, given a fine of 3,000 francs and costs of nearly half a million. Of her three male ac- complices, who she had gallantly insisted were no more responsible than office boys, only one was convicted; Bloch, her ex-husband, got eighteen months. Audibert was acquitted and, at the joy- ful shock, died that night of a heart at- t:r tack. Count de Courville ,r had estahlished his inno- !' "Þ"." cence by claiming he'd lost ,., ."',, ",L ,,&h'k ,"b<'", half a million of his own (,...N"" & :\L'l',rs,, ', ,,'.. savings in the Hanau crash. S1REET OfWt NG S"l}', (Next day his wife sued !<<w'" ;:-"', ':' ' him for separation; the half million had been hers. ) I N April, Hanau success- fully appealed her sen- tence. The remarkable woman left prison, walked into a new office, and started business again. This time it was a brokerage house with the strangest customers' sheet ever published. This was called Le Secret des Dieux. The gods were the great international money figures, their secret was whether they would move the stock market up or down. Two thousand investors imme- diately paid Hanau 2,000-franc sub- scriptions each for this odd information, with its mixture of mythology, House of Morgan, Olympus, Sirius, and Sir Henri Deterding. It was suspected that, for their own ends, little gods gave her the remarkably inside dope she used in her attacks on the larger deities. Certainly she prophesied Loewenstein's crash and suicide a week before he threw himself from his private airplane into the Eng- lish Channel. Three days before I var Kreuger shot himself, she warned that he and his affairs were coming to a violent end. She surprised her subscribers by.describing the coöperative arrange- ment between Standard Oil and Royal Dutch; she even surprised Royal Dutch by hammering its stock down a few points on the Bourse. This time, Hanau was out not so much for money as for blood. In her folie de grandeur, she de- veloped a persecution complex; realiz- ing it was impossible to avenge herself on the entire Radical-Socialist Party, she concentrated her attacks on big business, which had helped put her away. Unfor- tunately for her, the talents she brought into play were less destructive than con- structive. She could ruin no great gods, but she couldn't help giving a lot of little mortals excellent stock-market advice.